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Walter Cronkite

The death of Walter Cronkite at 92 leaves Americans
contemplating the changes in our media since his heyday as our preeminent
television news anchor.It is hard
to imagine that we once looked to a network news broadcast as a digest of the
nation’s daily experience, that one voice was ever regarded as, “the way it
is.”We have so many ways to get
our news now, but none are so central to the American experience as the CBS
Evening News was in Cronkite’s day.

The first distinct remembrances I have of Cronkite are
from the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where he commented on Mayor
Richard Daley’s security tactics against reporters by calling them “thugs” on
the air and where he threatened to “pack up our cameras and go home.”I also remember his coverage of the
Apollo landing on the Moon, which was informatively detailed and yet still
inspirational.And finally, when
the Watergate scandal began to wane because the facts seemed too arcane for
most Americans to follow, Cronkite demanded, and got, a 22-minute, two-segment
report on the nightly news to illustrate the money trail that led from Cuban
burglars invading the Democratic National Committee headquarters directly to
the White House and the Presidency of Richard Nixon.

One of the ways to understand the profound difference that
good television journalism made in Cronkite’s era is to reflect on his coverage
of the war in Vietnam.Cronkite
was initially a proponent of the American escalation there, and his coverage of
the war reflected his orthodoxy for a while.But as his reporters began to bring back stories that
contradicted the military and White House perspective on the conflict, Cronkite
decided to go see Vietnam for himself.After the 1968 Tet Offensive, Cronkite journeyed to the war zone and saw
the protracted civil war for what it was, a stalemate that couldn’t be won by
intervening American forces.

As a respected combat journalist, not only did Cronkite’s
on-air assessment strike a chord with a broad swath of the American public, but
his reportage was apparently pivotal to President Lyndon Johnson, who decided
shortly thereafter not to seek re-election in 1968.Johnson told his press secretary, Bill Moyers, that if he
had lost Cronkite, he had lost Middle America.Negotiations with the North Vietnamese began shortly
thereafter.

It’s hard to imagine Americans, high and low, responding
to a media figure today the way the country listened to Cronkite during the
1960’s.The firewall between news
and entertainment had not yet fallen at the networks— and there was a sense of
pride among the CBS news staff that they were carrying a public trust— to
present the events of the day to the nation fairly.Cronkite was the voice of that organization and it was
trusted to put journalistic standards largely above selling soap.

Another part of the work Cronkite and his colleagues did
was to unpack more investigative stories in long-form documentary shows, aired
in prime time.Pieces like “The
Selling of the Pentagon,” which detailed some of the scandalous ways that
military contractors used political connections and former military officers to
get incredibly lucrative contracts out of the Defense Department drew huge
audiences of American viewers and caused changes to be made in government
policies.One can’t remember
Cronkite without keeping in mind the organization he had behind him at CBS.

It
would be worth thinking long and hard as we remember Cronkite about how we
bring stories today to the public that the powers-that-be would still rather
relegate to the backwaters of our media.It won’t be through an organization at the major networks.That day is over, as is Walter’s.But it’s a legacy that should and must
live on.As we miss Cronkite, we
should also remember that his standards should be his legacy to his country.